Free Republic

Consider this cold comfort: A quick study of the brutal American cold snap found that the Arctic blast really wasn’t global warming but a freak of nature. Frigid weather like the two-week cold spell that began around Christmas is 15 times rarer than it was a century ago, according to a team of international scientists who does real-time analyses to see if extreme weather events are natural or more likely to happen because of climate change. The cold snap that gripped the East Coast and Midwest region was a rarity that bucks the warming trend, said researcher Claudia Tebaldi of...

The Russian revolution was the most utopian left-wing project in history, and it was a cataclysmic disaster. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, many Western observers concluded that the old Marxist dream was dead forever. But they spoke too soon. History is not over, and with the absence of any Soviet competition, Western capitalist countries — and especially the United States — have become hideously unequal, misery-ridden, and economically stagnant. In many ways, socialists in the early 21st century stand just about where they were in the early 20th century: politically marginalized, but leveling an economic critique that becomes...

Princeton University researchers have found that the climate models scientists use to project future conditions on our planet underestimate the cooling effect that clouds have on a daily — and even hourly — basis, particularly over land. The researchers report in the journal Nature Communications that models tend to factor in too much of the sun’s daily heat, which results in warmer, drier conditions than might actually occur. The researchers found that inaccuracies in accounting for the diurnal, or daily, cloud cycle did not seem to invalidate climate projections, but they did increase the margin of error for a crucial...

On Sept. 23, 2016, a group of protesters blocked a Burlington Northern Santa Fe freight train carrying coal in Spokane, WA, to prevent the earth from warming up. From a scientific standpoint, the action was absurd. As a piece of a political theater, it may have been more effective. The blockage by Rev. George Taylor and other members of groups called Veterans for Peace and Raging Grannies garnered widespread press coverage. And the protest may trigger a legal revolution as well. In a hearing tomorrow, a judge in Spokane is expected to hand down a written ruling allowing Taylor to...

The city is moving to dump its investments in fossil fuels, and suing five big oil companies charging they are responsible for global warming that has cost the city billions. Mayor de Blasio and City Controller Scott Stringer plan to announce at a press conference Wednesday that the city's pension funds will aim to divest from $5 billion in investments of more than 190 fossil fuel companies within five years. And the city filed a lawsuit in Manhattan federal court against five big oil companies — BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Royal Dutch Shell — looking to force them to...

Green sea turtles do not develop into males or females due to sex chromosomes, like humans and most other mammals do. Instead, the temperature outside a turtle egg influences the sex of the growing embryo. And this unusual biological quirk, scientists say, endangers their future in a warmer world. Already, some sea turtle populations are so skewed by heat that the young reptiles are almost entirely female, according to a new report in the journal Current Biology. “This is one of the most important conservation papers of the decade,” said biologist David Owens, a professor emeritus at the College of...

The impacts of climate change are among the environmental challenges facing Iran that helped spark protests in dozens of cities across the Islamic republic. At least 20 people have died in the uprising, driven by the sudden collapse of financial institutions, low wages and mistrust of national leaders. Rising temperatures are seen by some experts as an underlying condition for the economic hardships that led to the unrest. A severe drought, mismanaged water resources and dust storms diminished Iran's economy in recent years, according to experts who study the region. While the protests are largely driven by resistance to the...

The challenge of a possible cholera outbreak is facing Bangladesh as the climate-induced warming of the earth induces the growth for algae and bacteria, experts have observed. The temperature rise in Bangladesh will make possible the growth for various algae and bacteria, leading to more cholera cases in the country, said Dr Md Sirajul Islam, emeritus scientist of International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh. Global warming caused by climate change might influence the transmission dynamic of cholera, he added. The environmental microbiologist came up with the observation during his presentation on water treatment as an adaptation option to climate...

Mobs gathered outside some Caracas supermarkets on Saturday after the government ordered shops to slash prices, creating chaos as desperate Venezuelans leapt at the chance to buy cheaper food as the country’s worsening economy causes severe shortages.

The Independent Institute in cooperation with Canada’s Fraser Institute has issued a new 2017 Economic Freedom of North America report and California’s ranking shows what happens when politicians who have never held a real job or created real jobs in the private sector decide they can regulate an economy into success. California ranks 49th out of all 50 states, finishing just ahead of that slave to Big Government, New York. For some reason the wizards in Sacramento think driving out businesses and replacing them with illegal aliens attracted by “sanctuary policies” is going to pay off big the for state....

Academia turns a blind eye to the reality of actual socialism, the ideology practiced by Marxists while they sought the perfection of communism...someday. Socialism is ruining Venezuela today, and the whitewash pervades elite culture, even when the evil strikes close to home for an elite American small college. I attended Kenyon College (Gambier, Ohio) in the mid-1970s. I enjoyed my time there, made some great lifelong friends, and graduated with a sincere appreciation of the benefits of having a liberal arts education as it was practiced at the time. Over the years, my political perspective has moved well away from...

Bernie Sanders has opined for years on the necessity of raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, explaining that: By phasing in a pay raise for tens of millions of workers, we can improve living standards, lift families out of poverty, and provide a much-needed boost to our economy. Our bill will raise the wages of 41 million workers — an extra $3,500 a year in pay for full-time workers. The socialist Senator this past year introduced legislation in the Senate for the wage hike and while that didn't succeed (so far) has made the $15 wage call a...

The Interior Department’s number-two official issued a secretarial order just before Christmas rescinding several climate change and conservation policies issued under the Obama administration, saying they were “inconsistent” with President Trump’s quest for energy independence. Secretarial Order 3360, signed Dec. 22 by Interior Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt, wipes away four separate directives and policy manuals aimed at showing departmental employees how to minimize the environmental impact of activities on federal land and in federal waters, and calls for the review of a fifth one that applies to the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. Instead, it directs officials to reinstate and update guidance...

Native American tribes, islanders and communities of color led the toughest environmental fights of 2017. Thenjiwe McHarris of the Movement for Black Lives leaned into the microphone and, with a finger pointed firmly at her audience, delivered a powerful message to the 200,000 people gathered in Washington, D.C., for the People's Climate March. "There is no climate justice without racial justice," McHarris boomed as the temperature reached 91 degrees, tying a record for late April. "There is no climate justice without gender justice. There is no climate justice without queer justice." For a movement historically led by white males who...

With a seeming rise in the occurrence of snow days, blizzards and icy travel, the common belief that climate change isn’t happening comes as no surprise. Scientists stress that locally wintry weather conditions are not indicators of changes in climate, and weather conditions in one part of the world are not representative of what’s occurring globally. “It’s like saying, 'if everyone around me is wealthy, then poverty is not a problem,'” Peter Frumhoff, the Union of Concerned Scientists science and policy director and chief climate scientist, told CNN. Scientists point to hard data, including temperature measurements on land and water...

The globe is set to start drying out dramatically if global warming isn't stopped. That's the message from a new environmental study published by the journal Nature Climate Change . Over 25% of Earth will start experiencing the effects of "aridificaiton" by the year 2050 if humans don't meet the changes proposed by the Paris climate agreement . The study claims that if the Earth's average temperature goes up by two degrees Celsius over the next 32 years, the planet will start to become a desert. “Our research predicts that aridification would emerge over about 20-30 percent of the world’s...

Excerpt: "A 26-year-old white man who attempted to commit a terror attack on an Amtrak train in rural Nebraska also attended the doomed “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last August on the white supremacist side, according to a court document. St. Charles, Missouri resident Taylor Michael Wilson has been charged with an attempt to commit terror by targeting an Amtrak train in southwest Nebraska in October 2017. FBI Special Agent Monte Czaplewski, writing in an affidavit attached to the criminal complaint, suggested that Wilson wanted to murder black people. The document suggests that he had weapons, as well...

Theresa May has apologised for delays to NHS operations, saying she knows it's "difficult", "frustrating" and "disappointing". The Prime Minister had previously denied the NHS was in crisis saying it was “better prepared for this winter than ever before”. The NHS was forced to enact emergency measures after hospitals failed to keep up with the high demand. This included cancelling an estimated 55,000 operations such as hip replacements were axed until February. Jeremy Corbyn said it was not 'good enough' when the 'Tory Government has caused this crisis'. He tweeted: "Nurses, doctors and patients are pleading with her to properly...

With hospital shelves bare and the government stumped on how to settle $5 billion in arrears to pharmaceutical companies, cash-strapped Venezuela recently offered some foreign suppliers alternative compensation: diamonds, gold and coltan, the rare metal used to make cellphones and Playstations. The proposed exchange perplexed the pharma representatives, whose companies had no policies on accepting precious gems and metals as payment, according to three people familiar with the meeting last month where Venezuela’s health minister made the offer. While it isn’t clear if any of the companies accepted it, the proposal underscores how Venezuela’s economic collapse is forcing President Nicolás...

Every hospital in the country has been ordered to cancel all non-urgent surgery until at least February in an unprecedented step... The instructions... which will see result in around 50,000 operations being axed - followed claims by senior doctors that patients were being treated in “third world” conditions... Hospitals are reporting growing chaos, with a spike in winter flu leaving frail patients facing 12-hour waits, and some units running out of corridor space. [The] NHS medical director...ordered NHS trusts to stop taking all but the most urgent cases, closing outpatients clinics for weeks as well as cancelling around 50,000 planned...